Facebook today announced a major new feature that could put renewed pressure on Google+ and Twitter to out-innovate the social networking market leader. Facebook users can now choose to allow others to asymmetrically follow them thanks to the new (and optional) “subscribe button”– just like on Twitter and Google+. This is an opt-in feature, so you may not see it on every Facebook profile. The fact that Facebook even decided to go into this direction, however, shows that it may be changing its views on how “relationships” on the service should work and that it took a closer look at the success that Twitter and Google+ are having with this model.

It’s long been rumored that Facebook is working on adding some kind of music product to its feature set. What exactly that will look like remains to be seen, but Jeff Rose, an enterprising developer just discovered some code in the application Facebook uses to distribute its new video chat plugin that the company just launched yesterday. In this code, he found a reference to “Facebook Vibes.” While it’s not clear what Vibes will do, the fact that it will be a downloadable piece of software points toward an experience that will be similar to Google Music or iTunes in the Cloud (assuming, of course, that “Vibes” is really a music product).

Latest Posts

I'm a jaded tech blogger, but Microsoft's HoloLens project is without doubt the most exciting project to come out of Redmond in years. After years of talk about augmented reality, this may be the first project that actually lives up to the hype.